that the fewer neighbors he had, the fewer temptations. Nevertheless, when one considered that his chief business was horse-doctoring, it seemed rather short-sighted of him to live in the most inaccessible place he could find. The Bergson wagon lurched along over the rough hummocks and grass banks, followed the bottom of winding draws, or skirted the margin of wide lagoons, where the golden coreopsis grew up out of the clear water and the wild ducks rose with a whirr of wings. 

 Lou looked after them helplessly. “I wish I’d brought my gun, anyway, Alexandra,” he said fretfully. “I could have hidden it under the straw in the bottom of the wagon.” 

 “Then we’d have had to lie to Ivar. Besides, they say he can smell dead birds. And if he knew, we wouldn’t get anything out of him, not even a hammock. I want to talk to him, and he won’t talk sense if he’s angry. It makes him foolish.” 

 Lou sniffed. “Whoever heard of him talking sense, anyhow! I’d rather have ducks for supper than Crazy Ivar’s tongue.” 

 Emil was alarmed. “Oh, but, Lou, you don’t want to make him mad! He might howl!” 

 They all laughed again, and Oscar urged the horses up the crumbling side of a clay bank. They had left the lagoons and the red grass behind them. In Crazy Ivar’s country the grass was short and gray, the draws deeper than they were in the Bergsons’ neighborhood, and the land was all broken up into hillocks and clay ridges. The wild flowers disappeared, and only in the bottom of the draws and gullies grew a few of the very toughest and hardiest: shoestring, and ironweed, and snow-on-the-mountain. 

 “Look, look, Emil, there’s Ivar’s big pond!” Alexandra pointed to a shining sheet of water that lay at the bottom of a shallow draw. At one end of the pond was an earthen dam, planted with green willow bushes, and above it a door and a single window were set into the hillside. You would not have seen them at all but for the reflection of the sunlight upon the four panes of window-glass. And that was all you saw. Not a shed, not a corral, not a well, not even a path broken in the curly grass. But for the piece of rusty stovepipe sticking up through the sod, you could have walked over the roof of Ivar’s dwelling without dreaming that you were near a human habitation. Ivar had lived for three years in the clay bank, without defiling the face of nature any more than the coyote that had lived there before him had done. 

 When the Bergsons drove 

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